Saturday, July 26, 2008

The above is my favourite track off Kim's Big Brass Four Poster album. I dug this out after being reminded that the Hastings Street Jazz Experience are backing her on this album.

This was during the period when Kim recorded an album with the group:

Hastings Street Jazz Experience Ja Mil

Kim Weston was interviewed by Dave Cole for In The Basement Magazine Issue 40 Nov 2005 - Jan 2006. This is what Dave wrote:

"Opting to return to Detroit and deciding to put recording and performing second to working in the city for the underprivileged community. She did however take time to cut the record, 'Detroit That's My Home Town', released on Rahkim Records. "That was supposed to be my label," she advised. "I had learned about production but I didn't know anything about the record business. The 'Rah' part of the label came from the young man who helped me and funded the money." There was also an impossible-to-find 1976 jazz album, on which Kim sings with a group called the Hastings Street Jazz Experience. "I'm amazed you know about that," she exclaimed. "I'm sure they'll be excited to even know that you're interested. It was some jazz musicians, local jazz musicians in Detroit. They are still there to this day and they got together to put this project on and they came and asked me if I would sing with them. It got a release but it wasn't like a record company that put it out, I think it was just some sort of private recording."

Ja Mil was released on Jazzman Records Spiritual Jazz CD. Here's the sleevenotes from that CD:

Detroit's Hastings Street Jazz Experience exemplifies the political and social nature of many underground jazz collectives of the '70s - a fiercely independent endeavour that sought to enrich the community as well as bringing the music to a wider audience.

Hastings Street itself was the centre of the so-called "Paradise Valley" - an AfricanAmerican community that sprung up in the '20s with the waves of economic migration from the Southern states. Home to numerous legal and illegal bars, clubs and businesses, and renowned for its plethora of music venues, it was almost entirely demolished in the late '50s to make way for the 1-75 interstate highway. Residents were relocated to housing projects on the outskirts of the city and one of the major locations in American jazz and blues history was lost.

Drummer and music teacher Ed Nelson named the band after the street to commemorate an important part of Detroit's Black history and underline the idea that the band was continuing local traditions which had been disrupted. Formed from members of a group called The Other Katz Quartet that included Ed Nelson and Will Davis, the band included players of all ages and with varying experience, from veteran Detroit Jazz players to young students who had never recorded before. Nelson viewed it as a chance for his pupils to play in a setting that they might never otherwise experience. The band's repertoire included pieces in various styles from throughout jazz history; running the gamut from cutting edge new compositions to older ragtime and bop. Their only album was funded by members of the band and was distributed locally on its release in 1976. Nelson instigated a policy that no musician or composer was allowed more than one track on the album, to give everyone a chance to have their material recorded. Even the sleeve image was hand lettered by one of his students.

Phil Ranelin

'Ja Mil' includes sanctified vocals from the soul singer Kim Weston - a Motown artist Nelson had known since both of them competed on their High School swimming team - and many of the musicians that played in the band also played sessions for the myriad soul music labels that were based in Detroit during the '60s and '70s. The line-up also includes some major figures from the jazz underground, including Tribe Records stalwart Phil Ranlin and Sun Ra sideman Walter Strickland.

The Hastings Street Jazz Experience was founded in 1972 by musicians Ed Nelson, Dedrick Glover and Charles Miles. Miller Brisker and Ed Nelson, who is percussionist on on all of the compositions, have to be seen as the driving force both musically and from a production standpoint. The musicians on this date all agree that without their energy and persistence the album would never have been finished. Miller Brisker,whose solo on Ja -Mil firmly demonstrates his lyricism and his ability to swing,is also the founder of the Detroit Jazz Composers Ltd which is responsible for all the compositions rendered here.It is especially rewarding to hear Teddy Harris Jnr, Nasir Hafiz and and Herbie Williams. Herb Boyd - Centre for Black Studies Jazz Research Institute.

There are several albums documenting the history of Hastings Street. One I can recommend is Ace's Battle Of Hastings Street CD which features tracks by stalwarts of the 50's Detroit recording scene including Joe Weaver, Eddie Burns, Johnny Wright and Eddie Kirkland amongst others.

An interesting book covering the Detroit music between 1940 and 1964 is The Birth Of The Detroit Sound by Marilyn Bond and S R Boland which you can pick up on Amazon:

Blue Suit Records also issued 2 CDs in the late 90's featuring the likes of Eddie Burns and Eddie Kirkland on new recordings evoking the memory of the 50's on Hastings Street called Hastings Street Grease: The sleevenotes to the above CD by John Sinclair offer the best summary of the history of Hastings Street that I have come across:

Except for a couple of raggedy blocks, straggling south from East Grand Boulevard, Detroit's Hastings Street is gone now. The Motor City's major African-American entertainment thoroughfare was gouged out in the late 1950s to make way for the Waiter P. Chrysler Freeway, a federally-subsidized fast track laid down to facilitate the flight of the city's white population to the northeastern suburbs of Hazel Park, Warren, Ferndale Royal Oak, Madison Heights and points north.

But for twenty years before that Hastings Street swung all the way from Paradise Valley downtown for fifty or sixty blocks north. The legend of Hastings Street was perhaps best told in a 1948 recording by The Detroit Count, a rough barrel house pianist who immortalized that pulsating scene by enumerating the many theatres, lounges, bars and rude night spots which thrived along the length of the stroll in his two-part 78 rpm single on JVB Records titled "Hastings Street Opera."

Then there was the man they called the Mayor of Hastings Street, a dapper, diminutive gentleman named Sunnie Wilson who painted a vivid portrait of Detroit in the 30s, 40s and 50s in his 1997 autobiography, TOAST OF THE TOWN. written with John Cohassey and published by Detroit's Wayne State University Press. Wilson was an intimate of the great Joe Louis and the popular proprietor of nightclubs, restaurants, and hotels serving AfricanAmerican citizens in the racially segregated near east side neighborhood between Woodward Avenue and Hastings Street. He saw and heard it all, and his account is a valuable addition to the small body of literature which examines the city's history.

Jazz stars like Charlie Parker, Billie Holliday, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, and Cootie Williarns played the Forest Club or the Flame Showbar as well as the Paradise Theatre on Woodward Avenue, sharing the stage with rhythm & blues recording stars like Dinah Washington, Wynonie Harris, Arnos Milburn, B.B. King, and T-Bone Walker. Sonny Boy Williamson even spent a few months in Detroit in the early 50s, playing with Calvin Frazier and Baby Boy Warren and providing inspiration to a young Aaron Willis, who gained national recognition sorne 15 years later as Little Sonny, "New King of the Blues Harmonica."

As Hastings Street began to disappear, a whole new generation of singers and musicians who grew up in or around the irnrnediate vicinity emerged to extend its influence across the world, from Jackie Wilson, Andre Williams, Little Willie John, and Hank Ballard & The Midnighters in the 50s to the Motown Records stars who put Detroit on the map in the 60s: The Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson &; The Miracles. Aretha Franklin's father, the Reverend c.L. Franklin, pastored the New Bethel Baptist Church on Hastings, where his sermons were recorded by Joe Von Battles and leased to Chess Records in Chicago. Aretha's first recordings were made there when she was 14 years old, and joe's Hastings Street record store and JVB imprint were also home to bluesmen from One-String Sam, Detroit Count, and Will Hairston to fledgling guitarist Johnnie Bassett, one of the leaders of Detroit's blues renaissance of the 1990s.

After Hastings Street disappeared, the Motor City blues scene dwindled to a handful of bars in rough neighborhoods where stalwarts like Little Sonny, Washboard WHlie, Boogie Woogie Red, and Little Mac Collins &; the Partymakers continued to entertain their friends and patrons well outside the mainstream of modern entertainment. In the early 70s Little Sonny had a shot at blues stardom via several fine albums for Stax Records' Enterprise imprint; a wild collection of Motor City blues artists was spotlighted at the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues &; Jazz Festival; and blues man Bobo Jenkins and deejay/entrepreneur Famous Coachman established a series of free Detroit Blues Festivals, a Detroit Blues Society, and a weekly blues radio program on WDETFM, but these were at best shots in the darkness of American life in the 70s.

There is another book worth chasing down on the Jazz scene in Detroit:

Kim 's recording of Detroit on Rahkim involved Ronnie McNeir who she had help to support after meeting him in California. She told Dave Cole for In The Basement about how she met Ronnie:

"I met Ronnie at my church out in California. Someone called and asked if I would talk to this young man. I went to meet him and I listened to him. I liked him and I took him to Mickey." Ronnie became something of a protege for Kim and she provided guest duet vocals on 'Extra Extra' and 'Spirit Of Love' from eponymous albums on RCA and Prodigal respectively.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

After a few months delay, I understand that Evidence records have released a new Garnet Mimms CD.

Here is an interview with Garnet Mimms with Nick Cristiano published in The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year:

Garnet Mimms didn’t see himself as a musical trailblazer when he cut the career-making “Cry Baby” in 1963.

“No, not really, but they told me I was,” the 74-year-old gospel-soul singer says with a laugh while sipping coffee at the Oak Lane Diner, not far from his home and the church where he is pastor.

“They” include R&B expert Robert Pruter. In the liner notes to 1993’s “Cry Baby: The Best of Garnet Mimms,” Pruter writes that the No. 1 R&B smash and No. 4 pop hit - credited to Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters - was “one of the great seminal songs in the emergence of soul music. ... The song was a gospelized production so full of the soul-saving, fire-and-brimstone ecstasies of the black sanctified church that it singularly stood apart. ... Never had the public heard anything so intense and so emotional on top 40 radio.”

Mimms is sitting and reminiscing about “Cry Baby,” which was later famously redone by Janis Joplin, because he is about to come to the attention of the pop music world for the first time in three decades with the scheduled March 25 release of “Is Anybody Out There?” on the Conshohocken, Pa.-based Evidence label. The 15-song set finds the Philadelphia singer once again rousing listeners with his gospel-rooted style on a collection that allows him to stay true to his religious convictions while also appealing to a secular audience with tales of inspiration and uplift.

“They’re great songs,” Mimms says. With most of them, “you can take and interpret them any way you want.”

The album was recorded in Nashville with Jon Tiven, the producer and multi-instrumentalist who co-wrote 13 of the selections and who has worked with such soul greats as Wilson Pickett and Betty Harris. (Other writers on the project include country-soul pioneers Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, the late Little Milton and Johnny Taylor, folk-rocker P.F. Sloan, and former Rascals leader Felix Cavaliere.)

“I was listening to one of his greatest-hits records, and I said to myself, this guy needs to be making records these days,” Tiven recalls over the phone from Nashville. “And as far as I knew, he hadn’t made a record in 30 years, which was about right.”

Howard Tate & Jerry Ragovoy

Tiven called Jerry Ragovoy, the veteran producer and songwriter - and the man behind “Cry Baby” - and got Mimms’ phone number. Mimms told the producer he was singing only gospel these days, but Tiven offered to send him some songs. When Mimms liked what he heard, the project moved forward.

(In truth, Mimms says, he had been thinking of a return before Tiven called: “I had several well-known pastors here in Philly telling me, you should be recording and going out there and being on TV and everything.")

So why did Mimms leave pop music when he did? At first he simply says, “I got saved. ... The Lord came in and saved me. It’s hard to explain, but when the spirit of the Lord comes to you, it just takes you that way, and that’s the way you have to go.”

It’s true that by the late `70s the hits had dried up. But unlike, say, fellow Philadelphia soul man and former singing partner Howard Tate, he didn’t experience any dramatic downfall in his personal life. “I never did drugs. Never smoked marijuana,” Mimms says emphatically.

Ragovoy remembers it that way, too.

“I’ve always had the fondest memories of Garnet. He’s a good human being in addition to being a very talented man,” the songwriter and producer says from his Connecticut home, adding that he’s happy about the new album. “He made a decision (to leave pop) based on his own inner feelings, and not influenced much by exterior circumstances. ... It’s a very inner kind of recognition of who you are and what you want to be.”

Mimms does eventually allow that “after my father passed in `78, I just lost the zeal for that kind of music. Disco came in, with the lights and the loud music. I was always a balladeer. I didn’t like all that loud stuff.”

He keeps busy with his ministry. Besides being pastor of the nondenominational Glory Land Ministries on West Cheltenham Avenue, Mimms ministers in various prisons and detention centers in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

To help promote “Is Anybody Out There?,” however, Mimms is ready to put together a band and play select dates. He also hopes to return to England, where, like other American soul greats, he is much more revered than he is here. (He cut a live album in London in 1967.) And yes, he would perform some of his old hits.

“The songs I sang were clean songs,” he says. Besides, “I’d have to do `Cry Baby’ and `A Quiet Place,’ or they’d stone me, run me out of the place.”

Mimms has lived in Philadelphia since he moved here at age 18 from his native West Virginia. He and his wife, Deloris, have a daughter, Tenea Lyles, of Northeast Philadelphia, who also sings gospel, and a 2-year-old granddaughter.

To see him during Sunday services at Glory Land is to see a man who finds great joy and fulfillment in what he does - preaching, reading Scripture, hearing testimony from his congregants and leading them in song. And when he takes the microphone to deliver a gospel ballad against a recorded backing track, it’s to see up close a singer who is still capable of transcendent, soul-stirring power.

Which is not to say he doesn’t look back fondly on his days in the pop limelight, sharing stages with the likes of Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson - “my two favorites” - James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, and many more.

“The other life, the R&B, was a great experience for me. Even now, as a pastor of the church, I can look back over those years and say I learned a lot, I did a lot of traveling, and so it (helped me) as far as knowing things, and knowing people and dealing with people.”

He’s excited about what’s to come as he returns to the musical trail he helped blaze a long time ago.

Last week, I picked up the sad news from All That Jazz that the New Orleans artist Chuck Carbo had died:

Hayward “Chuck" CarboSinger for Spiders R&B Quintet

Carbo was 82, a singer who fronted the 1950s quintet the Spiders, a group that made the world aware of New Orleans rhythm and blues, died July 11 in New Orleans after a long illness.

Chuck Carbo and his brother Leonard “Chick" Carbo started singing in their father's New Orleans church choir. They sang with the gospel group the Zion City Harmonizers before forming the Spiders under the guidance of studio owner Cosimo Matassa.

The Spiders had rhythm and blues hits in 1954 for Imperial Records with “I Didn't Want to Do It" and “You're the One." The singles “I'm Slippin' In," “Tears Began to Flow," “21" and “The Real Thing" followed. Dave Bartholomew, best known as Fats Domino's producer and co-writer, wrote the group's 1955 hit “Witchcraft."

The Spiders toured with Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and the Drifters. But by the late '50s, the group had disbanded as the Carbo brothers pursued solo careers. Lou Rawls successfully covered “You're the One," and Elvis Presley remade “Witchcraft."

In 1993, Rounder Records released Carbo's comeback CD, “Drawers Trouble," and the single “Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On" was a New Orleans hit. A second Rounder album, “The Barber's Blues," followed in 1996.

I have had a message from The Dynamites who are appearing at the festival:

We want to pass on this info from the Outside Lands organizers...

Green" your ticket in either of the following ways:

- Help reforest California

When you buy your tickets, you'll be given the option of donating either $1 or $3 to help reforest California. These donations will go to the National Arbor Day Foundation, who will use it to reforest areas of California that were damaged by the recent wildfires. One dollar plants one tree in California's damaged forestland.

- Offset your festival experience:

When you buy your tickets, you'll be given the option of donating $1 or $3 to help "green" your ticket. These donations will be used to purchase (and then retire) pollution credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange. By buying and then retiring these credits, we'll directly prevent polluting companies from buying them and using them as a "right to pollute.

So here's Bobby Byrd to help you feel firstly how the Dynamites' funk can move yo' ass and secondly why we all need to get off our asses and do something before what happened to New Orleans or with all these fires starts to seem "normal.

So here's Bobby Byrd to help you feel firstly how the Dynamites' funk can move yo' ass and secondly why we all need to get off our asses and do something before what happened to New Orleans or with all these fires starts to seem "normal."

Thursday, July 17, 2008

I recently heard the song The Beat Goes On being used for a beer advert in the UK. A quick trawl around YouTube produced the above video. I have posted Cathy Rich's studio cut below. The song appeared on her father's album Big Swing Face Pacific Jazz PJ-10117.

The album featured: Buddy Rich (d), Quinn Davis (as), Ernie Watts (as/fl), Jay Corre, Robert Keller (ts/fl), Marty Flax (baSax), Bobby Shew, Yoshito Murakami, Charles Findley, John Scottile (tp), Jim Trimble, Ron Meyers (tb), Bill Wimberly (baTb), Ray Starling (p), Richard Resnicoff (g), James Gannon (b), Cathy Rich (vcl); recorded at United Recording and live at the Chez Club, Hollywood, California on February 22-25 and March 10, 1967. The Beat Goes On was recorded at United and the edited into the live cuts.

Cathy Rich (R) with Beverly Getz (L) on stage with Buddy

Cathy Rich The Beat Goes On Pacific Jazz

The track was issued by Pacific Jazz on a 45 in 1967 and it is hard to believe that she was only 12!!!

The original version of the song was by Sonny and Cher and you can compare the performances by watching the video below - I much prefer Cathy's!! The song has also beeen covered by the band All Seeing I - interesting mix and an ace video!

That’s right folks, you read right, George Porter Jr. and the Mickey Hart band are currently on tour, blazing every stage they touch.

Check the newly designed George Myspace Page, and website and see how Mickey has quickly rubbed of on George!

If you happen to be in the Big Apple than get yourself to the Filmore by 8pm and you will catch one of the best shows you’ll see this summer.

Also, don’t forget that Porter Batiste Stoltz will be rocking Gathering Of The Vibes this year!

Now for a bit of business; if any of you wonderful George fans have pictures for any of the past shows, we would absolutely love to get a hold of them to put up on the Myspace and George’s own website, all photos will be greatly appreciated.

John Betsch Society Ra Strata East LP Earth BlossomI played this album loads during my recent bout of decorating around the home!!!

I did mention a few months back that Earth Blossom had been reissued. The original LP was released in 1974 on Strata-East Records, N.Y. The album was recorded on January 11, 1974 at Glaser Productions, Inc. Nashville Tenn.

A killer set of hypnotic organ funk from Lyman Woodard -- an old bandmate of Dennis Coffey, and one of the shining lights of the 70s Detroit scene! This is amazing, amazing stuff -- Woodard's electric piano, organ and occasional mellotron and Norma Bell's alto saxophone lend a cosmic funk aspect throughout, very much like Death Wish-era Herbie Hancock! Ron English accents the thing perfectly with his languid guitar and bass groove, while Leonard King and Lorenzo Brown's drumming and percussion can keep the groove adrift, or tear it up in a funky maelstrom depending on the mission of the cut. It's totally essential Strata jazz funk -- and a record we've rarely seen, until now! Tracks include "Saturday Night Special (Parts I & II), "Joy Road", "Belle Isle Daze (Parts I & II), "Creative Musicians", "Cheeba Cheeba (Parts I & II)", "On Your Mind", "Help Me Get Away" and more.

This documentary is the first-ever official release of this historic concert, restored from original master tapes, with 20 minutes of recently discovered performances lost in the vaults for 40 years. Performers include Booker T. & the MGs, The Mar-Keys, Arthur Conley, Eddie Floyd, Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding.

I have listened to plenty of jazz during the last 3 weeks as I painted the house. I'll be sharing some of my favourite tracks over the next few days. First up is Marcus Belgrave's classic mid-70's Tribe label outing.

About Me

Welcome to In Dangerous Rhythm

I set this blog up back in 2005 to share my love of soul, funk and jazz music.

Thanks to all the people who have dropped by over the years and left comments or got in touch with me.

I am no longer posting on this blog due to other projects.

However if you browse the archives then you will be treated to posts featuring audio, Youtube clips, slide shows, interviews, tips on new releases, news features plus links to other blogs, websites, articles, books, magazines and videos.